Southern Comfort | Facebook and the Philosopher's Stone

Congratulations. You and I have found a way to live forever.

Although we likely haven’t realized it, each of us is in the process of transmitting a legacy. It’s a legacy of posts, uploads and updates, bounced around by satellite and preserved in a digital cloud. Nestled within an ever-expanding internet, it’s a legacy subject to neither the constraints of storage nor the rigors of time. It’s a record to which anything can be added — but very, very little can be taken away.

Managing these legacies is a challenge new to our generation, but it won’t be going away anytime soon. It’s up to us to appreciate the power — and recognize the pitfalls — of this deepening digital footprint.

The internet’s pervasiveness among young adults is now almost universal. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 95 percent of 18- to 29- year-old Americans go online with some regularity. Seventy-two percent of this demographic use social networking sites. Thanks to this steady swell of data, the total size of the internet has doubled roughly every two years. Many individuals’ web personas could now fill encyclopedic volumes.

As these legacies grow, they become ever more difficult to control. In a world in which information is abundant and unerasable, every Fling photo or Saturday-night Twitter update constitutes another piece of a permanent, potentially public record. Pictures can be untagged and updates deleted, but doing so rarely removes the offending item from the internet itself. How comfortable might you be posting pictures from your crazy 21st birthday if they might still be viewable five years from now? Twenty years? Forty?

It’s become a truism to watch what you post online. Countless self-help articles encourage the studied use of privacy settings, reminding job seekers that online activities can have very real offline consequences. Yet much less attention has been directed toward the fact that — once something has been posted — it is there to stay. Assuming the entire internet does not one day disappear, our embarrassing Facebook albums may already have achieved an immortality we’ll never have.

The implications are incredible. Imagine, for example, what will happen when members of our generation begin to run for political office. It’s no secret that American elections are often negative and invariably personal. The 2010 midterms have seen allegations of witchcraft, cultism and even Nazism. These attacks have been developed by opposition researchers, drawn from old video clips, college records and stray photographs. What will such attacks become in a few decades, when most candidates have maintained a continual web presence for their entire adult lives? Will anything be off limits? Should anything be off limits?

There is another danger here. “The bigger problem is not that our digital footprints may one day come back to haunt us. Rather, the problem is that we may let such fears alter our behavior now, cultivating a digital footprint that is neither representative nor real,” said Cinema Studies and English professor Peter Decherney, who specializes in the study of media and internet policy. Those best equipped to excel in this new world may be those who police their identities to the brink of paranoia and risk becoming fake people in the process.

As college kids in 2010, these all seem laughably abstract worries. Social networks are still fairly new. Most of us are not going to run for office, and even if our digital records persist, that doesn’t mean they’ll be easy to find.

Yet our online legacies continue to grow, with little sign of slowing and no chance of control. Centuries from now, our lasting testament might very well be that one awkward photo from Alcapulco. It’s a funny thought — but it gets a lot less funny when you realize it could also be true.

Emerson Brooking is a College senior from Turnerville, Ga., and a member of the Undergraduate Assembly. His e-mail address is brooking@theDP.com. Southern Comfort appears on alternate Tuesdays.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.